While low-end shared hosting is cheaper and may work just fine for many types of websites such as blogs, personal websites, & small corporate mini-sites, what it definitely doesn’t work for is e-commerce websites. To understand why – it’s important to know what shared hosting really is. Shared hosting combines multiple (and by multiple we mean anywhere from 2 to 500+ websites on a single server), allowing you to host your website at a lower cost compared to having a server all to yourself.

Sounds great, right? Not really. E-commerce websites require far more resources (like memory, CPU, disk speed/access) than a blog or personal website would require to run efficiently. Slap that e-commerce website on a shared server with 500+ other websites, and you have yourself a recipe for disaster.

Imagine that your company was just featured on the front page of People.com; and all of a sudden your website started exploding with traffic. With all of the websites on your shared hosting account fighting for the same resources, there is bound to be a bottleneck - and that bottleneck is going to negatively impact your bottom line. You will be faced with poor performance, slow loading times, and both lost and unhappy potential customers.

Find below a real example of a traffic surge experienced by an EndLayer client. Now ask yourself... Would your website be able to handle this type of traffic surge? or would it 'explode'?

You may be paying $4/month to host your e-commerce website, but is it really worth losing $10,000 in potential sales when you could have been paying as low as $89/month for a better-suited hosting environment? Of course not; yet thousands of websites are still making this dangerous mistake!

Without question, the biggest part of running a successful e-commerce website is your ability to get your name & product out there. Driving interest and traffic to your website is your number one priority. And for that reason - your website must be able to withstand an influx of paying customers.

This is where low-end shared environments commonly falter, completely crashing at a moment's notice during a traffic surge that could have brought the company thousands of dollars in revenue. Not to mention your tarnished reputation as an unreliable merchant for not making responsible website hosting choices; which would have ensured maximum up-time for your valued customers.

In the web hosting industry, you truly get what you pay for. There are thousands of website hosting companies that will charge you $4/month to host your e-commerce website (a popular one rhymes with 'NoDaddy').

"What they don't tell you is that they're going to cram as many websites as possible into a single server. If any one of those 'other' websites gets hacked, now your website (which is on the same server) is vulnerable to an attack."- Michael Farin (Co-Founder of EndLayer)

To make it worse, we’ve actually seen websites hosted on “servers” that are no more powerful than the majority of high-end smartphones currently on the market. Add to that the constrained cheap bandwidth (think of it as everyone at your house downloading 5 movies at the same time – can you say “buffering?”) – and this combination really creates the perfect storm when it comes to losing business for your e-commerce website.

Find below a real example of a GoDaddy server. Would you want your website to be on the same server as 182 other websites?

Here's the bottom line: if you currently receive or process more than a few (3) orders per day on your e-commerce website, don't pay $4 or even $8, $10, or $20 for your website hosting! You are going to get exactly what you pay for. Low-end shared hosting will cost you more in lost business than what it would cost you to implement a proper hosting solution for your e-commerce business.

EndLayer’s flavor of shared hosting – called SPC & SPM – are high-performance hosting solutions that place no more than 18 websites on a single server. This equates to guaranteed top-notch performance and even room to grow when you need it most.

Here are just a few great reasons to partner with Endlayer for your e-commerce website: